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Category Archives: Gender

Gender Warriors: Reading Contemporary Urban Fantasy is available. I am very proud of the work that Melissa Anyiwo and I did in this text, and our contributors did a phenomenal job with the text. Steve Anyiwo created another amazing piece of art for the cover.

This text is dedicated to the memory of our brilliant friend and fellow aca-superheroine Rho Nichol. In so many ways, this book is informed by our conversations over the years about the genre and the gendered implications at the heart of its creation and reception.

You can check it out on Brill’s webpage, or you can buy it from Amazon. The book is great for fun reading, but it’s also designed to teach. Please consider adapting it in your courses if you teach.

It’s that time of the year…my favorite month…my favorite holiday. Happy Samhain month everyone! It means #31daysofHalloween. As a horror film scholar, it also means #31DaysofHorror, which is a yearly challenge to watch a horror film a day. This year I’m doing 31 horror films but with my twist: 31 feminist horror films. In brief, feminist horror films examine elements of gender and sexuality and also explore the cultural systems that build and buttress those gender and sexual social boundaries. (Want a longer explanation of feminist horror full with specific film analysis. Well it’s coming soon in the form of my dissertation. Or you can check out my slightly longer explanation here.)

The one very practical criteria for my viewing list was that I had to have easy access to the film, which means it is either streaming somewhere that I subscribe to or I own a copy of the film. Most of the films on the list are full-length feature films, but a few are short films by some great indie filmmakers. Pre-warning though, a couple I haven’t seen before, but they were recommended as feminist horror films that I might like.

XX (Anthology directors: Jovanka Vuckovic, Annie Clark, Roxanne Benjamin, and Karyn Kusama, 2017), if you’d like to read my initial reaction you can find it here, available on Netflix.

I’m on a roll with female-directed horror films lately, so today’s installment is Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook (2014), which has been distributed by IFC Midnight (See the trailer). You can see it in your local indie theatre or as a digital rental from iTunes, Google Play, or Amazon. (It’s streaming for $6.99—seriously it’s totally worth every penny and more.) My brain is quite full of things about this film, and I do believe that it has found its way into my dissertation. So this will be brief but I have to write something about it right now!

Here’s a very brief synopsis: Amelia (Essie Davis) is a single mother struggling to raise her son, Samuel (Noah Wiseman), after the death of her husband. Samuel’s fear of monsters in his room at night heightens his pre-existing behavioral struggles. A book entitled Mister Babadook appears one night for story time, which begins the torment, sleeplessness, and emotional and psychological breakdown of Amelia. (Also I’m going to try really hard not to give any spoilers here.)

The Babadook is part suspenseful psychological horror, part monster movie, part possession film, and all just flat-out scary in a quiet and creepy way. The Babadook haunts this film as a specter, a creature, an idea, and a possessive force. He is both the monster and the catalyst for the monstrous. The Babadook is the thing that we fear in the dark that creeps out of our closets and from under our beds.

It’s actually the normality—the underlying sense that none of us can keep our lives together all the time and that things have to give—that creates the backdrop and evokes our own fears of failure to be good enough. There are moments of absolute discomfort for the audience, especially in the moments where we see Amelia struggling with her parenting and Samuel’s overall difference. Amelia’s on-going grief over the loss of her husband is palpable and real. I could feel the hole within her and her gut-wrenching loneliness and heartache at his absence. It’s the type of grief that can never be healed or filled but the type that leaves a scar for life. Even though Amelia holds it all together pretty well, the center cannot hold with that much pain, especially when Samuel’s fears keep her awake at night and the Babadook manifests in their lives. The madness that lack of sleep, fear, and the utter exhaustion of balancing her motherhood with her selfhood establishes a feeling of deprivation and terror that at first seems to be normal fears of a woman who just doesn’t know if she can do it all anymore. (Which I think many of us understand and fear as well). But Samuel’s fears are founded, and the monstrous is real in this film.

The Babadook is a film full of the questions that haunt us. How do we protect those that we love from things we can’t understand or see? How do we protect them from the worst of ourselves? How do we balance all of the emotional, physical, psychological issues that we struggle with in order to be whole even in the midst of the realities of life and loss?

My suggestion is to watch Kent’s The Babadook. I don’t think you’ll regret this creepy, sly, and ultimately feminist narrative about a mother battle real life concerns alongside the supernatural world. It reminds us that our everyday lives are horrific and monstrous at times just like this smart and intriguing horror film.

Having recently finished JR Ward’s much-anticipated 11th installment of the Black Dagger Brotherhood series (BDB), Lover at Last (2013), I have been wrapped up in thoughts of this book. If you haven’t read the series, I highly recommend it, especially if you enjoy vampires, romance novels, or urban fantasy. The series beginning with Dark Lover (2005) is incredibly compelling, fast-paced, and overall a fascinating take on the vampire. It is absolutely one of my favorite vampire series of all time.

Lover at Last centers on male/male couple Quinn and Blay, whom the readers have watched transition to adulthood, become warriors, and generally just be awesome people. The tension has been building for years between the pair but also for the readers. Many fans worried that Ward may not give Quinn and Blay their HEA (happily-ever-after) moment. When Ward announced Quay (fan lingo for Quinn and Blay) would have a book, the concern for some of us became: will she maintain her graphic descriptions of sex with a male/male couple?

I will begin my thoughts by saying that I adored the book. It was wonderful for Quay to have their book that was thoughtful and intriguing. Ward has a knack for putting entirely more obstacles than the couple can feasibly overcome in one book and yet somehow they do; this trend holds true in Lover at Last. The periphery stories lines also pushed us to see where the series can go even now that all the original Brothers and many of the key figures introduced within the first few novels have had their stories. Most importantly, the novel solidified my adoration of Quinn, who has always been a character with depth, kindness, compassion, and loyalty hiding under the guise of his hard-ass attitude. Quinn completely shines in this novel. We were able to see the Brotherhood and their allies pull together yet again to support each other through challenges.

And yet . . . and I may be about to lose my Cellie (term for Black Dagger Brotherhood fans) street credit here, but I have two critiques of the novel that I just can’t get out of my brain since reading the novel. If you haven’t read this novel yet, I’m about to reveal some SPOILERS, so stop reading now if you don’t want to be spoiled.

First, Quinn and Blay’s sex life completely described in the vein of male/female sexual relationships to the point where it feels dismissive of male/male sexuality. More importantly, it demonstrates a lack of understanding of the physical difference in sex. As a slightly more than occasional reader of male/male romance novels, the glaring and obvious lack of the use of lube ever in the novel is quite jarring. During every sexual encounter, I found myself kicked out of the scene to think about the fact that there was no lube. Now, just a sex educator note here: the type of sex this male/male couple engages in with no lube is a very bad idea. In a positive example of male/male romance novels that describe sex, author Cameron Dane‘s character seem to have lube stored just about everywhere from travel packs in pockets to between couch cushions to every drawer in the house to multiple locations in the car. Additionally, Quinn and Blay, like all male vampires in the BDB world, are absolutely gigantic in all ways. During Quinn’s first experience as a bottom, there is no lube, no preparation, and the sex is quite rough. Here’s the thing: I absolutely believe that Ward’s treating of their sexual relationship as if it were a straight relationship makes the relationship and the male/male sex in this untraditional installment of a mainstream romance series more palatable to the general reader. I don’t want to condemn the description of their sexual encounters in the novel, but I would have loved there to have been a more realistic portrayal of sexuality, which leads me to my other concern.

So here are my questions to ponder: Were you put off by the lack of realistic portrayal of male/male sex? Would it have been distracting for you if Ward had mentioned the use of lube?

[One more warning for a SPOILER here because I’m going to specifically speak about the ending of the novel]

In the long run, this lack of realistic portrayal of male/male sexual encounters is somewhat petty compared to what I felt was Blay’s utter bigotry. In chapter seventy-four, Blay and Quinn argue about their relationship. Blay completely dismisses Quinn’s desire for a relationship because Blay argues that Quinn is hiding who he is. In Blay’s mind, Quinn is lying about his sexuality. Throughout the series, Quinn has engaged with both men and women in sexual encounters, though he never bottomed until he does with Blay. Blay absolutely believes that Quinn is really gay and just hiding it because he can’t fathom being gay because of the other rejections he has faced in his life. Blay pretty much says that Quinn can’t be bisexual or have a sexual orientation that is something other than gay. This attitude reeks of “how do you know you’re gay if you haven’t tried to be straight?” It is a black and white, reductive vision of sexual orientation in which only gay and straight exist and that those things are in fact static categories. Blay’s outlook felt incredibly demeaning. The most disturbing part, though, is that Quinn acquiesces and does actually tell Blay that he is gay. Ok, so do people realize that they are gay after denying it? Yes, all the time. But in my reading of Quinn throughout the series, he had always seemed to embody that grey area in which sexual orientation is not a dichotomous construction of gay versus straight but is a spectrum of physical and relational behaviors and attractions. Blay’s reaction felt dismissive of anyone whose identity does not fall into the neat categories of gay or straight; it reinforced the belief that sexual orientation and gender are stable unchangeable and definable labels that others can place on you simply by deciding they know better. Did others read Quinn as lying to himself throughout the series in the way Ward seems to be suggesting?

This fan of the BDB series has decided to continue to contemplate these issues even while loving the novel and being ecstatic that Quay had their HEA. I hope that folks begin to engage in conversations about sexual orientation and gender that are not reductive and dismissive of the spectrum of possibilities. As a sucker for an HEA, I hope that we can allow people to be who they are without these stifling barriers of labels. Once again, I’ll site the example of Cameron Dane, whose character Rhone (Quinn Security Series starting with Finding Home) had always dated women until his best friend Adam discloses his gayness and his love for Rhone. Rhone realizes his feelings and attractions for Adam are far more complicated; Rhone’s sexual orientation falls in the grey area in which he does not have to define himself in order to find the love-of-his-life.

Overall, I am pleased that Ward chose to create these amazing characters–these strong, beautiful, loyal men–who discover that their love for each other is not only accepted by their friends and family but makes them stronger as individuals. Quinn and Blay break boundaries of stereotypes of gay men and remind us all that masculinity is not a static category that depends upon heteronormativity.